Presenting violence against women as an urban issue examines this form of violence as a spacial, location-based issue rather than a systemic one. Violence against women occurs at high rates regardless of location, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, and therefore operates as a systemic issue. I took issue with assigning gender-based violence an urban brand, because of the way that hierarchies of power and control that feed violence against women exist on individual levels as well as societal ones, regardless of physical location. Additionally, posing rape and sexual assault as an urban issue suggests that these crimes exist because of the structure of a city, that there are more dangers to women and more rapists in places with higher populations and more anonymity. This feeds into the false narrative that a person is more likely to be a victim when exposed to circumstances like dark city alley ways, when in reality most rapes are committed by an acquaintance or intimate partner. I do not think that the existence of an urban setting enables the act of rape more than a rural or suburban setting. 

However, our discussions in class proved that there is value in examining violence against women from the urban lens to see the ways in which the state fails to resolve such a widespread crime and perpetuates the social control that rape and assault create. Asking the question of whether cities are safe for women proves useless because women aren’t fully safe anywhere, but it is useful to ask what ways are cities marginalizing to women specifically. Based on our conversation in class, the existence of the slut walk movement in response to victim blaming by authorities, and the widespread mistreatment and neglect of rape evidence, it is clear that the urban structure marginalizes victims of assault. While this could certainly mean men and non-gender conforming individuals too, a high percentage of sexual assault victims are women, making this widespread neglect by the authorities a gendered issue.  

I use the term “neglect” intentionally. In response to my own expert question of whether the untested rape kits were an act of neglect rather than a resource problem, I believe that it certainly represents state perpetuation of violence against women and is deliberately neglectful. Of course, the department in Detroit “did not see the accumulation of untested rape kits as a problem” (Campbell, Shaw, and Fehler-Cabral, 157), meaning they did not publicly recognize their complicity in the act of neglect. One police officer commented that the uproar following the discovery of the rape kits was “just a big broo-ha-ha about nothing” (Campbell, Shaw, and Fehler-Cabral, 157). This impression differs dramatically from the conclusions of the investigative team, which stated that, “Based on their analysis of 400 randomly sampled kits, it appeared that the overwhelming majority of the SAKs in police property had never been adequately investigated, the survivors had been treated in retraumatizing ways by police personnel, and the community needed a long-term plan for change” (Campbell, Shaw, and Fehler-Cabral, 154). While the existence of such a problem is in itself a form of neglect and systemic violence against the victims of these assaults, it is also distinctly problematic that the department did not even recognize the issue. Perhaps they were simply deflecting the criticism by diminishing the issue. But the possibility of the department genuinely failing to see the problem in neglecting the evidence of 11,000 cases of assault speaks to a hegemonic violence against women that is thoroughly normalized in society.  

I also think it is important to look at the difference in response to crime against women versus other forms of crime. The police department in Detroit blamed the problem partly on a lack of resources. As JP Hughes commented in class, it is surely possible to gather enough resources to test rape kits regularly, as exemplified by the police department in Georgia that he mentioned, who mobilized the resources to test all their kits after a backlog of kits. Thinking back to the ways in which police departments in cities handle other forms of crime, particularly crime associated with low-income, Black and Latinx men, the excessive use of resources to incarcerate these men discredits the argument that the authorities are hurting for resources. Sociologists Victor Rios, Alice Goffman, and others demonstrated that the hypercriminalization of these men meant that extensive amounts of resources were expended by urban police departments across the country to enable the mass incarceration of men of color. Regardless of the triviality of the offenses committed by these boys and men, the system called for punishment, in ways that appear deliberate. Why do the authorities treat gender-based violence so dramatically differently?  

Furthermore, does the state have interest in the continuation of gender-based violence? This is a radical statement, but it is important to examine how the established neglect of the state could be completely intentional. Is the widespread neglect of evidence for assault cases a similar political act as the hypercriminalization of low-income Black and Latinx men? Are the authorities mistreating rape cases deliberately? This posits that the state is actively engaged in perpetuating gender-based violence, rather than passively aiding in its existence. If this is the case, how do we fight back against a culture of violence when the state is deliberately supporting it?